Sunday, 18 March 2012

Apologies for the delay

It seems I've been lax in my postings of late, and it's been at least three weeks since I've said anything. I won;t bore you, but due to some personal issues I've had a hard time working on it. I've even managed a few false starts, but I've resolved to keep this up, so I will.

I'll take this post to just talk about some of the things loafing around in my head, and return with some regularly scheduled mayhem soon. There's a bunch of stuff happened in our Dresden game that just got a little (a lot!) silly.

But back to everything else.

I was debating how to keep track of health or damage in the system I've been working on. I thought about a static five damage slots, with the damage applying equally from physical attacks or mental stress. Then there'd be an option to buy off your damage by trading off a line of the character sheet.
If you recall, it worked that the character had five aspects, five skills/achievements/what-have-you, and five pieces of equipment that they never went without. By trading off a line, you lose an aspect, a skill and a piece of kit. They don't necessarily have to be relating or focus upon the same task, the point is your character becomes more limited. It's very heavy-handedly stolen from Chris Tregenza and co.'s 6d6rpg.
The other issue I'd been having was that of scale, specifically with dice rolling. The point was to come up with a viable system for d12s. That worked, but it meant a lot of swing, and became especially difficult when I did some dice rolling to kill time and didn't seem to roll very well at all. I know that the average of high d12 minus low d12 should not have so many results equal 1 or 2 or 3, but the data seemed to skew that way. I thought it would hug lower numbers, but rarely rolling above a 3 seemed to push it, probability-wise. I know what the curve looks like, but if my dice were that random, the rolls would show it. I might need new dice.
The system was perfectly viable with smaller dice (Feng Shui uses d6s and was part of the inspiration, Qin uses d10s), and didn't seem to skew too badly. So it metamorphosed into a d-whatever system. But I have ideas for the d12s. It's mostly about power levels. Superheroes would likely use d10s or d12s, as would the idea I'm putting together around the Malazan Book of the Fallen (fansite, since there's several novels). The d6s and d8s would better suit the boy scouts, child's toy dream defenders, and maybe generic science fantasy. I'm working on that.

I've also want to run Synapse again, since the rules were fun and the story worked well. But for some reason, I'm just not in the mood to right now. I've got a lot of stuff buzzing around my head, and I want to finish what I've started with some of it, but I also want to try out the new ideas. The eternal dilemma, it seems. I think I'll set aside a time to run it properly, on a weekend or something soon. See how much I can get done if we play for more than two hours.
And if I don't get distracted plotting Legend of the Five Rings, Traveller, and other sordid things.